111 degrees in the shade

   

     To be honest, when I stepped out of the air conditioning of Sky Harbor International Airpot in Phoenix Wednesday morning, I expected to be hit with a red hot hammer. After all, this is the city being crushed by the full brunt of global warming, 31 consecutive days above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. That has to be brutal.
     Yes, it was only 103 at the time, about 11 a.m. I'd experienced hotter, and perhaps that was affecting my expectations, memories of that 105 degree day in 1995. Back then, I'd walked a block to the dry cleaners in East Lake View and immediately home to lie down, wrung out, spent.
     Six hours earlier, it had been 58 degrees when I'd walked the dog in the early morning cool of Center Ave. I'd considered wearing a jacket, but figured, "Enjoy it while you can."

     Stepping through the automatic airport doors, I even formed phrase, in my mind, just to be ready, "Jesus fucking Christ!" Or some such thing. It was on the tip of my tongue.
     Only the 103 degree heat was ... bearable. Not a shock at all. Dry heat, as they say and ... could it be? ... slightly balsam-scented. Phoenix smells like a hotel sauna.
     As the temperature rose, I went about my business. Delivering my younger son's cat (I can almost hear readers who learned their parenting skills watching "The Great Santini" lunging for their keyboards to lecture me about how I am a ruinously indulgent parent. Spare me; based on how my boys turned out, you don't have a leg to stand on. Off the charts).
     We swung by Phoenix's main drag, such as it is, and the Sandra Day O'Connor United States Courthouse. Phoenix is depopulated at 12 noon. Hardly anyone on the street. At Home Depot, where I went to buy the lad the cordless electric drill that every householder should own (note to Great Santini set: shhhhhhh) groups of Hispanic men waited under trees. Day laborers, waiting for work. I bet the heat they feel is much different than the heat I shrugged off, dashing in and out of air conditioned cars and buildings. So let's stipulate that. I can only report what I experience; I'm not the all-seeing-eye.
     Phoenix reminds me of Los Angeles, not an actual city at all, in the Chicago, cohesive-place-with-a-downtown-and-neighborhoods, sense, but more of a random agglomeration of disparate locations united in a municipal totality. Streets of tiny ramshackle houses gave way instantly to the ballpark for the Diamondbacks. ("How do they play baseball in this?" I asked my son, and he pointed out that the field is covered and air conditioned, which seems wrong). The stadium yielded to a stretch of office buildings, then back to cement plants and flooring outlets, welding supply companies and yards of lawn statuary.
     I tried noting the colors of the buildings, but here words failed me — maybe it's the heat. There was red brown and copper brown and rose brown, khaki and beige and khaki beige, a spectral wheel of brown: dun brown and tan brown and brown brown, with the occasional bright yellow and faded red for variety's sake, with lots of old mustard and yesterday's oatmeal.  Blame the sun — I saw more cars whose paint jobs had been seared off in two days in Phoenix than seen in two years in Chicago.

      There are many junior and community colleges and trade schools. As we drove Interstate 17, heading to dinner, I began to notice all the billboards were for personal injury attorneys, but left off one salient detail — the lawyers' names. Instead they read "Husband & Wife Lawyer Team" and "Accidentjustice.com" and nicknames like "Sweet James" and "Rafi."

     My guess is their targets have limited English skills. Digging around, I found the Arizona Republic dedicated an episode of its Valley 101 podcast on this very subject. Like most podcasts, it's an incredibly slow-moving 22 minutes of time-filling and tap-dancing — including an eye-crossing number blast probing whether Arizona has more lawyer billboards than other states, beginning with the protracted story of how, in 1977, lawyers advertising became legal in Arizona. 

     The key question — why so many personal injury lawyer billboards compared to billboards for supermarkets and accountants and every other form of human endeavor? — wasn't raised, never mind answered.

     Though one lawyer interviewed on the Arizona Republic did say, "If you have any soul at all, you have to kinda hate lawyer advertising."

    Yes, but why? That was asked.

   "Why does it feel like we're surrounded by them?" host Kaila White wonders, calling Mark Breyer, who with his wife Alexis constitute, "The Husband and Wife Law Team." 

    "The reason is ... " Mark Breyer begins, promisingly, then says, in essence, they're trying to reach people. Stop the presses!

     "If anyone can be your client, then casting a wide net kinda makes sense," host White reveals.

      The obvious answer of why we notice them — because they're numerous and crude, with their stupid nicknames and sledgehammer get-cash-now tone — is finally hinted at, toward the very end of the podcast, after 22 minutes of life I'm never getting back.
     After lunch, it reached 111 degrees, and I retired to a chaise by the pool. It was warm, but not unbearable so. My biggest trouble was my eyes — running and smarting. Did I say it's a dry heat? It is. A very, very dry heat. 
      The biggest way the brutal Phoenix heat manifested itself was when I went to relocate from the lounge chair to the pool. I went to step onto the concrete and drew my bare foot back. Too hot to walk upon. I put on my flip-flops, and walked over to the stairs. The metal handrail was too hot to touch. I slipped off one sandal, then the other, and stepped into the water.  

     We ate well , and since readers do both live in  and occasionally visit Phoenix, I probably should go into detail. Lunch the first day was at the Welcome Diner at 10th and Pierce, where I had the "Carol" sandwich — smoked pork shoulder, Carolina BBQ sauce and tangy coleslaw on a fresh baked biscuit, with homemade lemonade and a slice of their hibiscus cherry piece 

     Dinner was a place my kid discovered because it's in a strip mall by the Goodwill, the lyrically named "Soup & Sausage." I tried kvass for the first time — think a rye bread soda, not sweet, almost like an NA beer, but dark. And a platter of pierogi — chicken, onion, and two sour cherry — a pair of well-crafted sausage, and a mound of sauerkraut.

      Dinner in Phoenix Thursday night was at Taco Boy's — as much as I sometimes lament a missing possessive, the presence here made me itch to ask the oldest person behind the counter if he were the Taco Boy, and to congratulate him on his grammar. But the place was hopping, and I thought better than to bother anybody. The food hot of the grill and fantastic — the first taco I've ever gotten that was too hot to pick up when I unwrapped it.

     Speaking of hot. We were there about 7 p.m., and people were sitting outside, enjoying dinner on the patio. It was 106 degrees. But a dry heat. You get used to it.